


empty resonance of the past

by Lyre (Lyrecho)



Series: ring a bell [1]
Category: Tales of Vesperia, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Fusion, Angst, Coda To The First Strike, Gen, In Which The Blade System Is Yanked But Nothing Else, The Author Does What They Want, Unfortunately The Dog Dies, Vesperia Characters, all aboard the trauma train
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:34:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26458780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyrecho/pseuds/Lyre
Summary: “We’re gonna get along swimmingly, I can tell,” says Yuri.“Drown,” hisses Flynn.It’s the perfect start to an almost-beautiful friendship.|Tumblr||Twitter|
Relationships: Yuri Lowell & Flynn Scifo, Yuri Lowell & Hisca Aiheap, Yuri Lowell & Repede
Series: ring a bell [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1923445
Comments: 9
Kudos: 27





	empty resonance of the past

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aerora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aerora/gifts).



> shoutout to aer, for creating this world with me. without our dms this never would have come around <3
> 
> also shoutout to rar because like, this is a xbc2 fusion au, but it's also 100% more a distant cousin to YWKON than it is vanilla xbc2 (because YWKON is better than vanilla xbc2 YEAH I SAID IT)
> 
> story/lore/world notes at the end so you have the context of the fic behind you when you read them *finger guns*

There is light, where there was none before.

There is something, when there was nothing before.

Yuri blinks, and breathes, and looks up from the hand clasped around his wrist -- _his core crystal_ \-- to take in the face it belongs to. A shocked face, eyes wide, cheeks just shedding the last vestiges of childhood chub.

 _His driver_.

Cold breaks through the warmth; wet seeping through his pants.

For the first time since he started existing, Yuri looks away from his driver, and at the world he’s been born into.

It’s daylight. It’s pretty.

He’s in a river.

He looks back at his driver, and raises a brow. “Weird place to choose to resonate with a blade.”

Patchy red flames up on his driver’s cheeks, his ears, his neck. His shock fades for a scowl. “I was just -- just skipping rocks,” he snaps. “I didn’t ask for you to show up!”

“Wow, rude,” Yuri says. “You couldn’t tell the difference between my core crystal and a _pebble_?”

Wordlessly, his driver flips Yuri’s hand over and removes his own. Affixed on the back of his hand, edging down toward his wrist, is a cut of not-quite-onyx. Smooth, small, and dark, he has to admit that, under the flowing currents, it might have been easy to mistake it for a pebble.

Even so, he can’t let his driver off _that_ easily.

“So!” He says, and makes to stand up. Water trickles down his back and legs, which he ignores, and his driver scrabbles away from him, which he doesn’t. “I’m Yuri,” he says, softening his tone just a little, because his driver is looking a bit like an overwhelmed bird about to take off in panicked flight. “Your brand new blade, at your service!” He dips into a teasing -- but not outright mocking -- bow. “And you are?”

For a long, long moment, his driver is silent.

“Flynn,” he says. “Flynn Scifo.” His tone is wary, and his body language is, too -- all stiff walls and shaky, poorly hidden exhaustion. Yuri has to wonder just how much it is his driver -- Flynn -- even knows about blades, because knowing even the basics should tell him Yuri is probably the last person in the world he has to be afraid of.

Flynn’s life _is_ his life, after all.

“Flynn Scifo,” he repeats. “You out here alone, kid?”

That patchy, angry red deepens. “I’m not a kid!” His driver snaps. His voice pitches up halfway through, and Yuri raises a brow at him.

“You sure about that?”

“I’m _seventeen,”_ Flynn snarls, spat out through gritted teeth.

“And I’m an aegis,” Yuri says drily. “There’s no way you’re a day above -- what? Twelve?”

A low, inarticulate howl of rage. “I’m seventeen!”

“No, you’re not,” Yuri says, and taps at his core crystal. “If you’re going to lie to me, you’re going to have to either become a better liar, or get a proper hold on your end of the emotional bleed. You’re radiating guilt, kid.”

“It’s _Flynn,”_ he insists, “not _kid,_ and I’m _basically_ seventeen-- my birthday is in almost two months!”

Yuri squints. That reads like truth, but those cheeks still scream ‘just started puberty’ to him. “You’ve got an unfortunate case of babyface, then,” he informs his driver.

Flynn shoves him back into the river.

“We’re gonna get along swimmingly, I can tell,” says Yuri.

 _“Drown,”_ hisses Flynn.

It’s the perfect start to an almost-beautiful friendship.

-x-

The aer surrounding them lights up in Yuri's senses, tasting of ozone and the Captain. He laughs, a little breathless, as the monsters surrounding them die -- they're safe, in the barrier Chastel cast, him and Flynn both.

Flynn is angry, though, that poison bleed trickling through to him, and he isn't surprised when his driver yanks him up by the collar to shake him. 

"What were you _thinking?"_ he snarls, and shakes him again. "You nearly got yourself killed out there."

Yuri rolls his eyes. "You worry too much. The Captain throttled that blast for monsters - wouldn't have even made a dent on my core crystal."

"No, but it would have vaporised _you,"_ Flynn hisses. "Tell me, are you _really_ that stupid?"

"You would have been able to resonate with me again pretty much straight away even if the worst had happened, which it didn't --"

"You wouldn't have been able to remember me!" Flynn's voice cracks, and Yuri pauses as he realises -- his driver is dangerously close to tears. He's always been an angry crier.

“Hey,” he says, and reaches up to untangle Flynn’s fingers from where they threaten to tear his collar right off his shirt. “I’m fine, see?”

“You’re _stupid,_ is what you are,” Hisca murmurs as she passes them by, heading to where Chastel stands. It’s as spooky as ever to see them stand by each other -- they’re completely identical; a newborn blade imprinting on their first driver so deeply as to share their face.

They like to play it up, and pretend to be each other, never letting anyone know which of them is truly the blade. It works on most people, for some reason, and Yuri has never understood _why_ \-- between the two, only Chastel radiates ether like a blade would?

“Are you paying _any_ attention to me at all,” Flynn snaps, “or do you need a few more moments to continue staring at our coworkers?”

Yuri rolls his eyes. “Flynn. _Calm,”_ he says. “No one can survive being this angry for too long -- you’ll give yourself a heart attack, and then I’ll be dead anyway.”

_“That’s not funny, asshole.”_

Flynn’s snarled words give him pause. If he’s swearing, he’s serious -- it’s hard to tell, with Flynn, sometimes, because he feels things so wholly and completely that judging intensity by how much he floods the bond between them is impossible.

“Would it help if I say I’m sorry?”

“Depends. _Are_ you sorry?”

“...I’m sincerely sorry to have worried you?”

Flynn sighs, and his shoulders slump. “But not enough to not be that reckless again, huh?”

Yuri shrugs. “What can I say? I’m replaceable,” he says. “You can weep over lost memories all you want, but the fact is that I _would_ have survived that. _You_ wouldn’t’ve.”

“...You’re not replaceable, Yuri,” Flynn says finally, quietly, and Yuri frowns.

“I’m a blade. The whole point of me is that --”

“You’re not replaceable to _me!”_ Flynn snaps. “You shouldn’t be replaceable to yourself, either -- what the _hell,_ Yuri --”

Foot, meet mouth, for about the hundredth time that night. Chastel is frowning at him now, too, though, which makes him wince almost as much as Flynn’s rage fuelled incoherency. 

“Hey, hey,” he says, and holds Flynn’s hands tighter, still twisted around his collar. Under his touch, that grip loosens, but Flynn still doesn’t let go. “No point stressing in might-have-beens, yeah? Nothing bad happened --”

“Nothing bad happened _this time --”_

“-- and I’ll _try_ to be less reckless next time.”

Flynn’s snort at that really just warms the cockles of Yuri’s heart -- his driver has so much faith in him that it’s touching, really -- but with a sigh, he finally drops his hands and steps away from Yuri. “Let’s just get home,” he sighs. “I’ve had enough of your nonsense for the night.”

“Sir, yes, sir.” Yuri clicks his heels together and salutes.

It’s harder than he wants to admit to dodge the elbow Flynn throws his way, but he manages it, and even turns it around on him -- looping his arm around his driver’s and pulling him in for a hug.

Flynn yelps as Yuri ruffles his hair, and it’s like they’re back at that riverbank again.

 _“Yuri!”_ Flynn snarls as he shoves his Blade off of him. “You’re _impossible.”_

Yuri grins. “You love me,” he says.

“You’re a plague upon me,” Flynn says, before marching on ahead, leaving Yuri jogging to catch up.

“You didn’t deny it!”

-x-

At this point, Flynn and Yuri have been together for years. They’re practically inseparable -- joined at the hip ever since the boy who had dragged a core crystal out of the river had been dragged into the palace in turn, and had been conscripted into the army.

At the time, Yuri’s reaction to that entire drama had been one loud _what the hell,_ screamed down across the resonance to Flynn -- the only reason he hadn’t actually screamed it out loud had been his driver’s pale face; the tight grip on his hand from the silent boy that had not been silent at all up until this point. He’d taken the hint, and, cautious-minded enough to bite his tongue, had acquiesced to his driver’s request to not rock the boat.

Later, once they’d been shown to a small room they were told were their quarters, Yuri closed the door quietly behind them, very aware of the guards that had been posted outside. He’d sent his driver a questioning look, and the boy with the unfortunate baby face had sighed, looking miserable.

“They’re there to make sure we don’t run,” Flynn says, and then squints at him, accusing, like that should have been obvious. 

He opens his mouth, like he’s going to ask a question of his own, but too bad for him that Yuri’s not done. “Right, okay, that,” he says. “...Why?”

Flynn’s squint deepens. “We resonated,” he says.

“We did,” Yuri agrees. “You don’t seem to be getting that I’m not understanding why that warrants guards on our door so we don’t desert the army we’ve been strong armed into?”

“We’re a Driver and Blade pair,” Flynn says. “Those are always forced into the army.”

“Blades, sure,” Yuri agrees, because that sounds right, feels right, to some knowledge curling vaguely in the back of his mind. “But you? You’re just a kid, it’s stupid to force you to fight. The most efficient way to do it would be to kill me to break our resonance, and then give my core crystal to an already established solider --”

A pillow hits him square in the face, cutting off his words. His driver is looking at him with a mix of horror and realisation playing across his face, like he’s just come to the conclusion that Yuri has rabies and he’s locked in the room with him.

“I thought it was memories blades lost,” Flynn says, voice slightly distant. “Not braincells.”

Yuri frowns. “Rude.”

Flynn shrugs. “True,” he mumbles, before continuing on, louder, “do you not know how _rare_ drivers are? Rarer than however many true blades are left, probably -- most people are dead zones, these days.”

A lot of words that mean pretty much nothing to Yuri, but that doesn’t matter, because his mind narrows in on that first, incomprehensible part of Flynn’s statement.

_Drivers are rarer than blades, these days._

That -- that doesn’t make sense, that doesn’t make sense at _all,_ because if there’s one word Yuri would have never thought of applying to either blades _or_ their drivers, it would be _rare._

He runs a hand through his hair, hisses out a breath through his teeth. “What?” he says, slightly incredulous. “Did the world end while I was out, or something?” He taps at his core crystal, and wonders if it’s broken. The way Flynn is talking, this is really obvious, ingrained into the world knowledge, and -- _yeah,_ that’s the kind of thing blades take with them from life to life.

So...either he’s defunct, in some way, or he’s been lying dormant in that river for a _really fucking long time._

Both ideas are almost equally terrible, but Flynn is talking, so Yuri doesn’t have time to lose himself in his own mind. “I don’t know how you don’t know this,” Flynn is mumbling. “If you don’t know this, is it okay to tell you? ...am I _allowed_ to tell you?”

Yuri claps his hands, once, twice. “Flynn,” he says. “I get that this situation is shitty, and you probably don’t want to be here -- and, if I’m reading your end of the emotional bleed right, you kind of hate me, though that might just be because you’re hungry -- but I really, _really_ need you to understand just one thing here.” He pauses, to meet Flynn’s eyes, and hopes his driver can read the sincerity in them. “I’m on your side, okay? Even if you’re not certain of anything else, be certain of _that.”_

For a human, those words would probably be wildly inappropriate to say to someone you’ve known for barely a handful of hours, but Yuri isn’t human, and that same gentle warmth that had sparked that initial resonance so fast that Yuri hadn’t realised he was awake until he’d opened his eyes and _seen_ his driver still hums across that lingering resonance between them, subtle but _there_ beneath the anger and the fear and the deep desire for a sandwich. 

Flynn’s a good person, Yuri can tell that, without doubt, without hesitation. Right now, Flynn is about the only person Yuri trusts -- if he says _jump,_ Yuri is going to give him shit about it, but he’d still probably respond with _how high?_

That’s just how Blade and Driver pairs work -- or at least, that’s how his core hums they _should_ work, while his mind slowly sinks into the cold unease that is reality intruding: something about how things are now does _not_ match up to how they should be.

“Okay,” Flynn says, finally, after a long, drawn out moment of just staring at him. “Sit down,” he says, and pats the bed next to him. “If you don’t know anything, I’d better start at the beginning, and that...might take a while.”

Gingerly, Yuri moves to take the offered seat. His driver avoids his eyes, instead staring down at Yuri’s forearms -- the only skin his clothes don’t cover, except for his chest, which, yeah, that might have been a bit weird for his driver to be staring at. The mental image makes him chuckle a little, though.

“It’s an interesting colour,” Flynn murmurs, cheeks flushing pink as he realises he’s been caught. “Your aer, I mean.” He taps at the dark lines that cut through Yuri’s skin, like veins, or tattoos. They’re as black as his core crystal -- and instead of the glow you’d expect from most blades, they instead seem to be void of light entirely, as if made to absorb rather than emit.

“Wild,” Yuri agrees mildly. “Stop stalling, though, maybe?”

Flynn sighs. “Right,” he says. “First thing you need to know is pretty simple; you could get the info from pretty much any history book: a few centuries back, there was a war. A giant one, between humans...and blades.”

He’s tense, like he’s trying to gage Yuri’s reaction. He forces himself not to tense, and gestures for Flynn to go on, even as something panicked and disbelieving flutters inside him.

The more Flynn speaks, the more unbelievable the things he says become -- and yet, paradoxically, the more Yuri believes him.

He paints an ugly picture of this huge, historic war, and an uglier picture of what had led to it.

 _Blades...weren’t treated the best,_ Flynn had said, hesitant, and Yuri had nodded, because it had felt right, felt true, even as it had felt _unfair._

 _And then, they found a way for them to exist without having to rely on humanity,_ he’d said, and Yuri had frozen, because that... _didn’t make sense._ Blades _needed_ humans, needed drivers just to exist --

 _Flesheaters,_ Flynn had informed him, and Yuri’s stomach had turned over, think about the merging of human DNA into a blade’s aer, their core, how that would interfere with all sorts of processes -- including, yes, probably, the final command that hit a factory reset and compressed their data back into their cores upon the termination of the aerflow only a resonance could supply,

“They ate their drivers,” Yuri had said, and his voice had sounded hollow, even to him, as he tried desperately not to think about such deep, intimate, _self-mutilation._

“Some of them did, yes,” Flynn had agreed. “The earlier ones, who’d -- snapped. After them, though, as word began to get out...there were opportunists who took who they could. And there were the ones who liked their drivers, and never wanted to forget them, so they hunted for...other targets.” He shrugs. “To be honest, I don’t know much about the war outside of what’s taught here, and --”

“-- it’s the human side of the history, so it’s biased,” Yuri says, voice heavy. “How did it end?”

“In chaos,” Flynn says, simply. “A lot of people died -- blades and humans both. Eventually, the flesheaters withdrew, and losses on both sides had been so severe that no-one pursued. The flesheaters founded a place called Dahngrest -- these days, it’s a safe haven for them, still. There’s talk every few years of invading it, but, well…” he shrugs. “We just don’t have the power for it, anymore. Even hoarding what few true blades were left after the war, more and more people were born dead zones. Ah -- they can’t resonate,” Flynn had explained, seeing Yuri’s blank look. “No ability to manipulate aer at all, with or without a blade. No one knows why, but the big theory is that, with no blades around to crank up the ambient aer levels, it’s just too foreign to a human system for it to control.”

“And that’s why the people here are so feral for us?”

Flynn laughs, but there’s no humour in it. “We’re kind of a miracle for Zaphias,” he says. “A brand new driver, with a previously unknown, unregistered true blade.”

Yuri hums thoughtfully. “What would they do, if we tried to run?”

Flynn eyes him warily, but answers the question. “They’d kill you, for sure,” he says. “Then they’d probably keep me confined until I agreed to work for them without issue. I’d resonate with you again, we’d work as soldiers, and I’d be expected to resonate with any other blades they threw my way, too.”

Yuri had wrinkled his nose. “Gross,” he’d said simply. “Guess we’ll just have to grin and bear it, then!”

Flynn had sighed at him, then, a sigh that, over the years, he’d become quite familiar with. The sigh that said _you’re right, Yuri, but you’re annoying precisely because of that._ At that time, he hadn’t known all the nuances shoved into that one tiny exhale, but the bond between them had trembled with something edging hopelessness, drowning in resignation, and so Yuri had flopped back into the bed, and dragged his driver with them, and had held him close in an attempt to comfort him. At some point, they’d both fallen asleep -- Yuri had woken up the little spoon in their embrace when their door had been thrown open the next morning, and one of the guards that had been on their little detail had raised a brow at their position. 

“Good to see you both get along,” she’d said dryly, and then after that, it had been spread through the palace, and then the knights and soldiers in turn -- Zaphias’ newest Driver and Blade pair, sleeping together.

At the time, it had annoyed Flynn, but these days it was a source of amusement for the both of them -- partly because it was funny, but also mostly because you had to take the laughs where you could get them, and hindsight was _great_ for comedy when the present, to put it politely, fucking _sucked._

If there’s a downside to how well known it is that Flynn and Yuri play shadow to each other is, though, it’s that when Flynn is mad at him, everyone knows about it, because he avoids Yuri _so hard._ It’s like, literally, the only time when you can catch Yuri on his own: when he’s in the doghouse.

Kind of literally, this time. Yuri had thought the titters and giggles of Chastel and Hisca were bad, but the quiet judgement of Lambert’s stare might, in fact, be worse. Of course the Captain’s blade is just as good at making Yuri feel like the world’s biggest disappointment as their driver is.

“So, this is where you were, huh.” Yuri flinches at Hisca’s voice -- if it had been Chastel, he would have sensed her aer, but as it is, Hisca just about scares the life out of him when she appears, as if summoned to him by a throwaway thought. “Still not tired of avoiding your boyfriend, huh?”

Lambert settles down behind them with a grumble, as if accepting the fact that they were about to be forced to witness their social drama, but wanted them to know they weren't happy about it.

“It’s better to give Flynn some space when he’s angry,” Yuri says. _And it’s an even better idea to do that when he’s ‘not mad, just disappointed.’_ “I’m not avoiding him; the entire reason you could find me here is because I’m predictable, right? And Flynn knows me even better than you do. If he wants to find me, he _knows_ where to find me.”

“You know,” Hisca says, thoughtful, “normally, you’re pretty fun to argue with, because you’re a fucking dumbass, but then sometimes you say something that you back up with actual logic, and it’s like watching you get possessed.” She kicks some dirt up in his direction. “Who are you, and what have you done with Yuri?”

“Fed him to Lambert,” he says easily, and pushes himself to his feet. “You being here does tell me one thing, though.”

Hisca narrows her eyes. “And that is?”

“If _you,_ of all people, have come out to try and kick my ass into gear, I have _definitely_ been moping too long.”

Hisca’s next kick is aimed not at the dirt, but directly at him. Yuri cackles as he dodges around her, and uses his superior height to his advantage as he leaves her in his dust, racing forward to the barracks.

He can hear Lambert’s sharp barks in the distance. He translates them, probably accurately, as _no being hooligans._

“You’re dead, Yuri!” Hisca’s voice echoes out over the top of Lambert’s disapproval. “Do you hear me? You better be running to Flynn to say your final goodbyes, because you are _dead!”_

-x-

Yuri is swiftly hitting himself for his avoidance of Flynn -- the moment his driver walks into their room with an apologetic smile on his face, when _Yuri_ had been the one psyching himself up to pour out _sorry_ all over again, he narrows his eyes, and knows he’s about to hear something he doesn’t like.

“Commandant Alexei,” Flynn begins, and that is, literally, all Yuri needs to hear.

“No,” he says simply. Flynn sighs and rolls his eyes.

“If you’d just let me _start,_ let alone _finish --”_

_“No.”_

Flynn sighs once more, but there’s a reluctant grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “You’re impossible,” he says.

“And yet, you love me!”

They share a laugh, before Flynn goes serious. “He’s got a job for me,” he says. “It sounds important -- I have to take it, Yuri.”

Yuri groans. “You realise that would mean leaving Hisca alone in charge, right? That’d be bad enough, but she’s being _extra_ Hisca lately, since the Captain took Chastel with him on his trip. We leave, and we’ll come back to dead soldiers. She’ll terrify them all to death.”

Unease skitters down the emotional bleed, thick and unwanted, like choking down oil. The apologetic tint to Flynn’s expression is back full force. “Well,” he says, “it wouldn’t be Hisca in charge alone, because you’d be here, too.”

It takes a real, actual, legitimate minute for Yuri to parse those words. “You’re talking about leaving me behind,” he says, finally, flat.

Just once, Flynn nods. His mouth is pressed into a flat line.

The laughter that bursts out of Yuri’s mouth then is both involuntary and slightly hysterical. “Are you _crazy,_ Flynn?” he snaps. “I’m your _blade._ I’m meant to be by your side.”

“I won’t need you,” Flynn says evenly, and _fuck,_ that stings. “Hisca and the rest of the men _will.”_

Yuri blinks, and doesn’t know how to explain to Flynn that his life matters more than anyone else’s, to Yuri. Not even because it’s also _his_ life -- that’s just how it is. “I was joking, before, about Hisca being in charge solo being a disaster, you know that, right. Sure, she’s annoying, but she knows what she’s doing --”

“You’re _not_ coming with me, Yuri,” Flynn says, firm. “End of story. I _am_ sorry, but --”

“-- not sorry enough to change your mind?”

Flynn shrugs, and tries for a smile. It doesn’t quite pass, but gold star for trying. “The Commandant was pretty firm on that. No blades.”

Yuri doesn’t like that, and for just a minute, wishes for that snarly, suspicious teenager, all prickles and hating being forced into a soldier’s path. He loves Flynn as he is now, of course, but something about the loyal knight angle he likes to play these days just makes it so much harder to _connect_ with him sometimes. 

“I’ll miss you,” Yuri says, finally.

He doesn’t know it then, how true those words are, how they drip with prophecy.

He doesn’t know it then, how he’ll regret letting Flynn go that day for the rest of his life.

-x-

It’s quiet, with just Yuri and Hisca. That’s a pretty funny concept, considering they’re both the ‘loud one’ of their two pairs -- but without their other halves, they’re listless.

“I’m going to _lose my mind,”_ Hisca mumbles, one afternoon, standing on guard with Yuri, Lambert alert at their feet. “This is boring. And I miss Chastel.”

Yuri, who hasn’t slept properly since Flynn had travelled far enough away from him that he can no longer pinpoint his exact location or get a feel for his mood through their resonance, is absolutely not in the mood to listen to Hisca complain about missing her blade. “At least she’s with the Captain,” he mumbles. “Flynn’s _alone.”_

Hisca side-eyes him, _hard,_ before sighing. “Pact,” she says, and holds her hand out to him. “We just don’t talk about Chastel _or_ Flynn.”

“Deal,” Yuri says, and reaches out to take her offered hand.

Of course, that’s when everything goes to hell in a handbasket.

It’s Lambert that notices it, first -- tensing up underneath them as they shake hands, a growl building up low and wild in his throat. It takes Yuri a moment to hear it -- it’s the way Lambert’s aer spikes that has him looking down.

Hisca can’t feel the aer like he can -- she’s not a dead zone, but she’s still not a blade -- but she’s a soldier, and her gaze tracks his own downwards. She frowns. “Lambert?”

The name is barely out of her mouth when the Captain’s beast blade takes off, running for the forest. Hisca and Yuri exchange a look and a shrug before they take off after him; sure, they’re technically the ones meant to be on guard duty, right now, but if it wasn’t something serious, Lambert -- older and wiser than both of them, probably -- wouldn’t have bolted like that.

They both unsheathe their swords as they step into the gloom of the thicker woods past the roadside treeline; Yuri’s own blade is with Flynn, and he doesn’t want to call it to his side lest he leave his driver unarmed, and Chastel’s blade is less of a blade and more of a fan -- Hisca knows how to use it, sure, but it’s not exactly the most versatile weapon out there. Right now, plain steel will have to do for the both of them.

“Do you sense anything?” Hisca asks. “In the aer?”

Yuri’s about to shake his head when something brushes at the edge of his senses -- something cloying, something sweet. Something stomach turning, disgusting.

Something _rotten._

Hisca flinches, and while Yuri is turning to her to ask her what’s wrong -- his eyes catch sight of red dripping down her shoulders that is definitely not her hair -- she’s looking up, and her eyes widen. Her sword jerks wildly as her hands tremble.

She screams.

Instinct has Yuri raising his sword to deflect a hit from above -- the foul aer he can now taste from up in the trees almost has him calling to hand his _actual_ blade, but he swings with steel and tries to clear his thoughts and find calm before mindless panic fully sets in.

He claps a hand to Hisca’s shoulder, and she flinches as he tugs her out of range of _whatever_ it is that’s hunting them from the trees. “Hisca,” he says -- _orders,_ really. “ _Breathe.”_

For just a second, she closes her eyes with a whimper, and chokes around sobs. Eventually, she stops shaking, and when she reopens her eyes, the blind fear is gone. She’s angry, determined, even as she’s shaky.

 _Good,_ Yuri thinks, because this whole situation has him tense and sick -- from the poisoned aer and dread both. The only reason he’s keeping it even slightly together, he thinks, is that he has yet to actually glimpse whatever is is Hisca had seen in full, only tasted of its aer --

\-- and, to be honest, he’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to see whatever it is that had made _Hisca_ of all people scream like that.

Too bad for him, then, that it’s then that it chooses to drop out of the trees.

 _‘It’_ is really the best word for it, too, because whatever it is defies any label Yuri’s mind tries to apply to it. It’s human. It’s blade. It’s plant fish housecat bird. It’s alive and it’s rotting. It’s acidic, poisoned aer. It’s Lambert.

It’s Lambert.

Hisca whimpers beside him. Yuri wants to whimper too, and curl up in a ball and cry somewhere, but he can’t. Not here, not now.

It strikes, and while they’re both still in shock, preservation instinct kicks in, and they both barely manage to dodge out of the way. Yuri claws at the edges of his mind, tries to bring them back together so he can focus and _think clearly,_ but it’s hard, it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done.

He readies his blade once more - steel, not shadow -- and says to Hisca, “run.”

From where she’s pushing herself up off of the ground, she freezes, eyes widening. “What?”

“Run!” he snaps, and parries another strike from the _thing_ that stares at him through Lambert’s dead eyes. If Hisca doesn’t get it, he doesn’t have time to explain, but isn’t it _obvious?_ He’s the blade here -- if he dies, his core can be collected later, and returned to Flynn. Hisca’s the human, flesh and blood and just the one chance at life, so _she’s the one in danger here --_

A strike he can’t dodge, as _whatever it is_ snakes and splits itself in two; one lightning fast tendril whipping out to clash with his sword, the other lunging for his side. _Shit._

Impact, but not the impact he was expecting. Hisca throws herself into him, knocking them both down -- it saves his life, he’s sure of it, but it leaves her wounded as the thing rips through her flesh. She bites on her lip to lock down a scream, but Yuri can still hear it as she collapses on top of him.

“Idiot!” he snaps. “I’m a _blade --”_

_“So is Lambert!”_

Hisca’s words are fully hysterical, but for just a moment, they give Yuri pause. She’s right, Hisca’s right. Lambert is a blade, same as him…

He swallows, and thinks of all the confusing pings the mass before him had struck against his aer. 

It bears repeating: _shit._

They need to run -- they need to run, and hope that this thing, whatever it is, won’t chase them outside of the woods. He shoves himself to his feet, and tugs Hisca up with them. Somehow, they’re on the same wavelength, because when he starts to lead them back in the direction they’d come from, she stumbles before finding her own feet and follows him easily. 

The sound of trees snapping and crashing into the ground echo from behind them. The thing is pursuing. 

Yuri grits his teeth. From the corner of his eye, a shadow looms -- he whirls, and brings up his sword just in time to avoid his head being impaled.

That’s its last hurrah, though, because immediately after deflecting the attack, his sword -- already bent way out of shape -- snaps right in half.

“Hisca,” Yuri says, for the third time, _“run.”_

Hisca shakes her head, but she’s still moving away from him. She doesn’t try to argue this time -- she knows, as well as he does, that whatever this is, it needs to be reported. At the very least, one of them needs to survive.

And of the two of them, Yuri will last longer as a distraction.

With a mental apology to Flynn for, well, everything, Yuri finally gives in to that preservation instinct that’s been clamouring in the back of his mind, and calls his blade to his hand. Sleek and dark, a shadow sword forms, and Yuri feels the cleaner aer rush through him with relief.

Hisca is gone. That’s good.

“C’mon, then,” he murmurs, stretching his senses into the shadows of the woods, trying to find wherever it is that the creature has hidden itself away for its next attack. “Come to me and die.”

It’s absolute bravado, but hey, it soothes his nerves, a bit. And you never know when a good taunt is going to work in your favour --

\-- the shadows to his left scream a warning as a _void_ moves through them, and Yuri blindly throws himself down just in time to duck a strike that would have bissected him. _Yikes._

He lets out a low whistle, mind racing as one thing becomes suddenly, frighteningly clear:

This thing, whatever it is, is avoiding striking at his core crystal. It wants him -- not alive, but _whole._

Yuri imagines it -- being killed, here, only to wake up a day, a year, a decade, century in the future, with no idea of what had happened to him, no memory of the Captain or Lambert or Chastel or Hisca.

_No memory of Flynn._

The emotion that rushes through him at that thought, he doesn’t know how to name, but nevertheless, the shadows react to it -- to the furious aer he feeds them. His blade all but vibrates, humming a ready song in his mind.

 _I will_ not _die here._

The thing lunges, but all Yuri can see is Lambert, the beast blade he’s known for almost as long as he’s lived, twisted into something monstrous. He ignores the rest of the thing, the tendrils that reach for him, cutting and tugging, the biological makeup that screams nonsense in the back of his mind as lifeform after conflicting lifeform register --

And he simply pays attention to Lambert. His friend.

Like shadow itself, his blade strikes true. Lambert had not yet been pulled fully into the amorphous _blob_ that made up the greater whole of the creature. His head and torso still remained free.

And thus, so did his core crystal.

Yuri’s blade slides into it easily. Far easier than he thought it would, to be honest -- it’s always unnerving, to be reminded of how fragile your so-called immortality really is. A chime, as it splinters, cracks, and shatters. One shard lodges itself deep into Yuri’s hand as the creature recoils, silently yowling in pain.

It does not fade, like he thought it would. Like he knows core crystals do upon that final, fatal termination command.

As far as Yuri knows, the only way for a blade to leave remains is for said blade to become a flesheater. Lambert, faithful blade, had loved his driver. Beast blades rarely turned to flesheating anyway, from what Yuri knew of them. There was absolutely no way Lambert had been one.

And yet, that shard of his crystal remained. 

His eyes flick to the creature, still writhing wildly, apparently unable to comprehend the pain he’d just inflicted on it -- or, at least, unable to recover from one of the minds that made it up being so suddenly severed from its system.

So much non-blade life, bundled up in a terrifying, biological impossibility. Being dragged into that mess...that would explain it, probably.

He wonders what it is, wonders _who_ it is that created such a monster, and _why_ \-- because there’s no way, absolutely no way, that it’s natural.

Still, those are questions that can keep until later. For now, while it’s still down, it’s his job to make sure it _stays_ down.

Aer pools along his spine, soaking in shadow and honing the edge of his blade. He raises his sword, and prepares to bring it down --

“Impressive,” says a voice from behind him, low and angry and somehow _familiar_ \-- 

Before he can whirl to learn more than that, though, a different kind of shadow to his own floods over his mind.

And he knows nothing.

-x-

When he wakes up, it isn’t by choice.

When he wakes up, he doesn’t know long he’s been out of it for.

When he wakes up, all he knows is _pain._

“Are you...are you _sure,_ sir?”

“We’ve got what we need from him, for now. I’m sure.”

“Yes, sir!”

When he wakes up, it’s just in time to feel the resonance between himself and Flynn _snap._

He does not die.

He does not die.

No matter how much he wishes and prays for it, he does not die. No matter how he screams at his core, trying to trigger his own termination command, he does not die.

He knows what this means, even if he doesn’t want to.

The pain is too much. He sinks back into darkness.

When he wakes up, he is alone.

And he is a flesheater.

-x-

You hear stories, of what it’s like, to become a flesheater, even if you don’t want to. Horror stories, mostly -- spread around the capital like gospel.

Yuri had mostly reacted to them with mild amusement -- it was obvious propaganda, to frighten any uncertain blades away from treason. He’d never really paid much attention to them; the idea of becoming a flesheater had never even crossed his mind. He was content with Flynn...no, more than that, he was _happy._ So he’d never really paid attention to the other blades whispering about what they’d heard of the flesheater life -- that it was painful, and limiting, and disorienting, and frequently dangerous, depending on how stable whatever aerflow the blade-turned-flesheater was left with -- but he’d always felt that those stories must have been somewhat exaggerated. If flesheater life was so awful, why would _anyone_ choose it? 

He knows, now, that whatever intent lay behind those stories being spread around Zaphias, they are assuredly, undeniably, true.

His journey back to Zaphias after his second awakening is slow, and painful, and he doesn’t remember most of it. All he remembers is the glint off of the shard of Lambert’s core crystal, still embedded in his hand, and the aching, pulsing void that screams of _flynn flynn flynn_ \-- or rather, of the lack of him.

Flynn. Yuri needs to see him again. If he just sees him again, he feels, at least _some_ part of his world will make sense once more. It has to.

It has to.

-x-

Yuri’s tired, and achey, but he’s still clearheaded enough to know that there’s a kill-on-sight order out for flesheaters, and his core crystal -- now a bright, angry red on the back of his hand -- makes what he is undeniable. So, instead of storming straight through the barracks to find Flynn like he wants to, he takes the long way around, and sneaks in through their window, just like he has done a thousand times before.

The room is empty, which pangs against Yuri’s heart, because he wants Flynn _now,_ but he is, at least a little, grateful for the reprieve. He flops back into Flynn’s bed, and for the first time since he’d last seen Flynn, lets himself relax.

He’s asleep before he knows it -- he wakes up to the sound of the door clicking shut, the bolt sliding home, and he’s jerking upright, slamming his back into the wall as his broken aer still struggles to form his blade,

And it’s Flynn, and he’s been crying.

Yuri goes boneless with relief. “Flynn,” he says, and slips off of the bed to make his way over to his driver, hands reaching out --

Flynn slaps his hands away. Yuri recoils, a pathetic, whimpering fear fluttering against his rib cage as his heart turns into a hummingbird.

“Why are you here?” Flynn sounds listless, and uncaring. He sounds dead.

“What?” Yuri laughs. It’s a broken sound. “Are you being serious, right now?”

“You wait until I’m away from you,” Flynn snaps. “And then you call your blade away from me, and _then,_ while I’m working, worried out of my mind because if you’ve left me unarmed, whatever you’re up against is something serious -- I _feel_ our resonance snap.” His eyes cut to Yuri’s core crystal, black completely overtaken by red, and something in his expression _twists._ “Was it Hisca?”

Yuri goes cold -- colder, really, because he’s already ice, because he can’t believe the things Flynn is saying, the _accusation_ in his tone. 

“What?” he repeats, helpless. “How could you ask that of me?”

_How could you think that of me?_

“She was the last person you were seen with,” Flynn snaps. “And you were likely the last person to see _her_ alive. So tell me, Yuri -- whoever you ate, _was it Hisca?”_

“I can’t believe you’re _actually fucking asking me that,”_ Yuri hisses. “Of course it wasn’t fucking Hisca!”

“You vanished, Hisca vanished, and the Captain is dead,” Flynn says numbly, and each new word is a knife twisted into Yuri’s stomach. “If Chastel was still alive before he passed, we don’t know. We still haven’t been able to recover her core crystal.”

Yuri feels sick -- not just because of the news, not just because of the way Flynn is staring at him and talking to him, all anger and grief and suspicion, but because…

_Hisca vanished._

He’d told her to run, and she had. But what if she hadn’t run far enough? What if she hadn’t run fast enough?

_Was it Hisca?_

_Whoever you ate, was it Hisca?_

He doesn’t know. He _actually_ doesn’t know, and the thought that, just as they took him, whoever took him, also nabbed _Hisca_ \-- just because she was there, an opportunity -- the thought that it could be Hisca staining his core crystal red...

Dizzy, he staggers back, and collapses onto Flynn’s bed. He feels like he needs to throw up, but he’s empty. A void. There’s nothing in him _to_ expel, except for his own poisoned, tainted aer.

Numb, grieving, but not yet crying, Yuri lifts his broken eyes to meet their mirror. “Are you going to kill me now, Flynn?”

Flynn looks away from him, down at the ground. “I should,” he says quietly. “It’s the law, and --” he bites back the rest of his words, mouth pressing into a hard line. It doesn’t matter. Yuri can still complete the sentence well enough in his mind: _and you’ve hurt me so much with this that I honestly kind of want to._

It’s unfair. It’s not his fault, he didn’t ask for this, not like Flynn seems to think he did --

\-- but right now, Flynn doesn’t want to hear that.

And right now, Yuri doesn’t have it in him to argue, or even attempt to explain.

“Why aren’t you, then,” he says, exhausted. It isn’t a question -- he’s too tired, right down to his soul, to ask questions.

Flynn doesn’t answer -- just stares at him for a long, long time. Yuri can’t read his expression, but he sees the pain there. That, more than anything, threatens to break him completely. 

“I don’t know,” Flynn says.

Yuri blinks back tears. “I should leave, huh.”

There’s a part of him that’s hoping Flynn will ask him to stay.

“Yes,” Flynn says finally. “You really should.”

There’s a part of him that shatters when Flynn tells him to leave. He’d almost prefer that Flynn kill him, he thinks, than reject him, as if _this_ mercy is something Yuri wants thrown at his feet.

Flynn helps him back out of the window, and Yuri can only focus on his driver’s -- _ex-driver’s_ \-- hand on the small of his back, painfully aware that this could be the last time Flynn touches him. The last time Flynn looks at him, speaks to him.

“Goodbye, Yuri,” Flynn says, before leaning back into his quarters and sliding his window shut.

The last time Flynn says his name.

Yuri leaves before he has a breakdown, right there, beneath Flynn’s window. He stumbles all throughout the city, barely aware of where he’s going, until a gentle hand loops around his arm, and tugs him into an alley.

The Yuri of yesteryear would have his sword out by now, grin on his face as he armed himself with blade and mockery.

The Yuri of now hopes that whatever death is coming to him comes quick.

But it seems that whoever’s leading him along does not have death on their mind at all -- it’s a woman, he sees, who sends him a smile over her shoulder, as if to reassure him. The shawl thrown over her shoulders slips with the movement, and his eyes can’t help but rest on the jade star on the nape of her neck -- pale green, riddled with veins of red.

 _A flesheater?_ In _Zaphias?_

“Where are you taking me?”

Her smile is sympathetic and warm, like balm. “Somewhere safe,” she promises. “The only safe place in this city, for people like us.” Her eyes flick down to his hand, where Lambert’s shard is still embedded. “A place where we can get _that_ taken care of before infection sets in too badly,” she says, scowling. “Your aer feels stable, so you’ll still heal faster than a human, but the catch to that is that you’ll _heal like a human._ Why haven’t you taken that out? Or tried to bandage it, at least?”

Yuri just blinks at her. “Time isn’t real,” he says finally.

“You really are new, huh,” she says, and a pain twists in that sympathy. “Thought so.” She lets go of his hand, and that’s when Yuri realises she’s led him straight to the Lower Quarter.

“You’ll be safe here,” she says, “for as long as you want to be.” She tilts her head. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“...Yuri,” he says, voice hoarse. He’s...slightly overwhelmed. “I’m Yuri.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Yuri,” she says, still so gentle. “Welcome home.”

Her smile says _you’re free._

He’s never wanted freedom less.

-x-

They give him a room at an inn, and a doctor comes to see him. They gently pull Lambert’s shard from his flesh before passing it back to him -- he’d asked to keep it. After the wound is disinfected, it’s wrapped well, in nice, clean bandages.

“I’d get one of the healing blades that live down here to come finish it off if I could,” the doctor tells him, narrow eyed, “but you’re more than just _new,_ you’re practically _newborn,”_ they sigh. “Your aer is going to be fluctuating all over the place for the next few weeks, though, thankfully, you seem extraordinarily stable. Until your body has had a chance to settle into its new design, I’d be leery of letting unfamiliar aer mix with your own -- so don’t go getting into any trouble that would _require_ a healing, you hear me?”

Yuri nods. “I hear you,” he says. He’s so tired.

The doctor leaves, and closes the door behind them. A short while later, Yuri can hear them conversing quietly with the innkeeper -- not a flesheater themselves, but married to one, apparently. Adopted one, too, if the little girl that rang of aer more than most humans do running around downstairs actually lived here.

A whole little community of flesheaters, coexisting secretly with humans, right here in the heart of Zaphias. It’s one of Chastel’s wildest conspiracy theories proven true.

His new heart skips a beat, grief thrumming to life at the thought of the quiet, gentle blade. He tries not to think about how it could be her driver’s heart beating in his chest. He doesn’t quite succeed. 

He turns over Lambert’s shard in his hand, and tries to think on anything else. To distract himself.

_?_

A connection pings in his aer, and he jolts, dropping Lambert’s shard. The moment it falls from his hand, the connection drops, too.

That’s -- not possible. That his shards had existed after his death was explainable, and known, but…

You can’t _resonate_ with a shard. Shattering is the final death, even for flesheaters.

Still...he hadn’t been imagining that, that stir of cool, pure aer against his own tainted blend. That rush to fill the void that had been left in him, empty and hungry, where Flynn used to reside. Hesitantly, he leans forward and reaches out, to scoop up Lambert’s shard once more.

The moment crystal touches skin, that connection flares to life once more. A query pinged straight into his aer, awaiting a reply.

Throat tight, Yuri swallows, and gives one.

_!_

A rush, like sherbert made of static buzzing thick on the back of his tongue, and light blooms, aer flowing from the shard into something solid and _alive._

It’s a beast blade, like Lambert was, but just one look makes it clear that it’s definitely _not_ Lambert. This blade is...younger. His tail thwumps on the bed as he lies down beside Yuri, staring up at him with adoration and a song of _driver driver driver_ ringing in the brand new resonance between them. 

His core crystal is hidden by his fur, which Yuri thinks is a good thing -- one look at it, and you’d be able to see it isn’t normal, because it’s still just a small, thin shard. He’s missing one eye, and Yuri wonders if that’s because of his core, too; a symbol of how he’s inherently broken.

Just like Yuri is, now.

He slowly reaches out, and his new blade meets him halfway, nosing at his hand.

“Hey, Repede,” he says, voice rough, the blade’s name falling from his lips as easy as breathing. “You look a little like your dad.”

And then, Repede curled around him, _safe_ in a way he hasn’t been for far too long, Yuri breaks down, and lets himself cry.

**Author's Note:**

> \- aer just replaces ether because i wanted to establish that this world was very much different to both xbc2 and YWKON, yes, for REASONS. that plot train won't arrive til later But It's Chugging On Those Rails
> 
> \- speaking of YWKON tho. yanked the etherlines from it, because they're Fucking Sick.
> 
> \- (slamming my hands down on a table) oblivious. aegis. yuri.
> 
> \- in regards to the scene where flynn and yuri interact post flesheatin', i just want to make it clear that Neither Of These Characters Are In The Wrong. they are both recently traumatised, and _neither of them are more or less traumatised than the other_. trauma is not a competition. yuri just went through something incredibly traumatising that flynn was also on the other end of and they have both lost people who were very close to them. they are not okay. flynn does something that are very shitty (immediately believing the worst of yuri) and yuri doesn't help in that situation (doesn't explain himself at all) BUT THAT IS FINE (IT'S NOT FINE, BUT, YOU KNOW) BECAUSE THEY ARE BOTH TRAUMATISED AND PROCESSING IT POORLY and i don't want it to come across like flynn is an asshole attacking a highly traumatised yuri. he is not. they are BOTH highly traumatised and NOT DEALING WITH IT WELL.
> 
> \- are chastel and hisca really dead? is it really hisca's heart in yuri's chest? they're alive in canon, so -- listen, if you think canon has ever mattered to me, you don't know me, I Do What I Want, but also, i will not confirm one way or another if we're going to meet chastel and hisca again or if they're really gonezo. y'all get to find out when yuri does, which may be never! have fun with that
> 
> \- repede??? how??? okay so lambert is repede's dad and i wanted to keep that. so now repede is a brand new baby blade born from a shard of lambert's core crystal. that breaks blade lore??? yes! even in this universe, that breaks blade lore and law! but!!! slams hands on that table once again. oblivious aegis yuri.
> 
> \- what do u mean alexei gave flynn a job he couldn't take with yuri??? that's not how that went in first strike canon. i mean yeah but. again, i don't care about canon. also aer and i FIXED THINGS so that alexei actually has a MOTIVE and END GOAL that MAKES SENSE and is UNDERSTANDABLE because we are GENIUSES. literally when we got to what alexei's role was in this au WE BOTH JUMPED TO GOOGLE TO SEE WHAT HIS DEAL HAD BEEN IN CANON BECAUSE WE'D *BOTH FORGOTTEN* that's a bad villain, sir
> 
> \- the series name is a WORK IN PROGRESS im bad at naming things this was my only thot but like. idk if it vibes well, It May Change In The Future


End file.
